Accelerating AAA progress in Central America

CoffeeFarmers

In Central America and Southern Mexico, we established a partnership with the International Finance Corporation (a member of the World Bank Group) and ECOM, one of our coffee suppliers, to help coffee farmers make progress on our AAA Sustainable Quality™ Program.

The partnership, which started in 2007 and originally ran until 2010, benefitted around 5,000 farmers in four clusters in Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica and Nicaragua. Making a long-term commitment to farmers belonging to the AAA community, the partnership has been extended for another three years and ran until 2013.

The program helps farmers to continuously improve in all three areas of the AAA Program: quality, sustainability and productivity. Farmers are supported in two ways. First, they receive extra technical support and training to complete the self-assessment part of the Nespresso AAA Sustainable Quality™ Program farm management tool, called the Tool for the Assessment of Sustainable Quality™ (TASQ™). Second, farmers get better access to finance to make investments that help them meet the standards of the program. The International Finance Corporation measured the impact of the partnership through surveys with coffee farmers and suppliers. They found a positive result: improvements on farm productivity and sustainability were accompanied by higher farm incomes.

This partnership also helped groups of farmers gain Rainforest Alliance certification. And once Rainforest Alliance certification has been achieved, coffee farmers are able to secure additional premiums for the coffee they choose not to sell to Nespresso.